


And Death Shall Have No Dominion

by Timballisto



Series: Carmilla Marvel!AU [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: BlackWidow!Betty, CaptainAmerica!Laura, F/F, Featuring, Focusing primarily on the Winter Soldier, Hulk!Danny, IronMan!LaF, WinterSoldier!Carmilla, and more to come - Freeform, marvel!au, with mentions of - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-09 22:50:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3267296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Timballisto/pseuds/Timballisto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>She knew of the concept of phantom limbs, and sometimes, when her mind managed to piece itself together enough for her to wonder at such things, she thought of herself as a phantom limb. A painful reminder of something long gone, a hurt without a wound.</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>or; the Hollstein Captain America!AU you’ve all been waiting for</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Laura opens her eyes. Her breath shudders in her chest, rattling, like those loosing pipes in the back of the plane when she’d hit the water—

_(the ocean. she can see the icerbergs floating on the surface, getting closer and closer, she doesn’t want to die but maybe she does because carmilla’s dead and maybe she’ll see her again—)_

She sits up. The room she’s in is small, and stale. More spartan than even the small Brooklyn apartment she’d shared with her father once upon a time. But, still, it’s nice. The wallpaper isn’t peeling, and none of the few pieces of furniture is propped up by books or empty cartons; the bed she’s sitting on is covered by blankets without holes, and sheets without stitches.

There’s a radio, in the corner, turned down to barely a murmur. She recognizes this song, something-something by the Andrews Sisters, about girls on beaches in Trinidad, and rum and coke with GI’s on leave.

The door opens, and a woman steps in. Her smile is professionally vacant, but her eyes are nervous. “You’re awake.”

“Yes.” Laura said, lamely. Because—because—something is off about this woman. It’s the way she’s dressed, the way she’s carrying herself. Her tie is too short, too wide, the knots all wrong, her hair curled a little too much and, well. Laura’s taken the underwear off enough girls on both sides of the Atlantic to know that whatever this girl is wearing under her pressed blouse is not right. “Where am I?” she asks instead, even though all of her instincts are screaming that this is a trap. 

“You’re in a recovery ward in New York.” The woman says, and Laura barely represses the urge to ask why she’s not dressed like it.

And it’s all clicking now, the oddities, because didn’t her father write to her just last week about how the broadcast network refused to play Rum and Coke by the Andrews Sisters because of some censorship scandal and how he’d had to stamp all over the boroughs to get the record himself? 

“Where am I really?” And Laura’s done being nice. Her arm twitches at her side for her pistol, and her arm feels too light without her shield, but this girl doesn’t look nearly mean enough to be HYDRA and that means she probably doesn’t even need it. 

“I don’t know what you mean.” The woman stutters, but the look of panic in her eyes gives her away.

“Please stop playing dumb.” Laura said, standing. She’s not imposing, she knows that (that serum could only do so much), but even weak as she felt, she refused to be a prisoner again. Laura took a step forward, and the woman stumbled back.

“Captain Hollis—“

The two men bursting in through the door ended any possibilities for Laura ending this quietly. They were dressed unfamiliarly, and the bizarreness of it all nearly allowed them to get the drop on her—nearly. Instead, she throws them through the wall, and clambers out over their groaning bodies, sprinting down unfamiliar hallways. Shouts echo after her, but no gunshots.

She bursts out of glass double doors and into the too-bright sunshine of a brave new world.

0o0o0o0

She looks the same. A twenty-five year old girl, seventy years removed. And he bruise circles under her eyes are etched deeper than Laura’s ever seen them, even in the darkest holes HYDRA had to offer, Carm had always had some stupid ass remark, some spark in her eyes—

“Carmilla?” she breathes, because she has to be hallucinating this. Maybe she died in the attack on New York, maybe she’s still in some HYDRA prison camp, because there’s no way that Carmilla is standing in front of her, breathing slightly heavy, after they’d just spent the last ten minutes trying to kill each other.

But those eyes—they’d been flat and dull with purpose the entire fight, a blank lens through which Laura had been assessed and measured. And now… and now…

That smooth brow furrowed, and the emotionless plane of the assassin’s face broke. “Who the fuck is Carmilla?”

It feels like the knife lodged into the van behind Laura’s head found it’s mark in her chest instead, because it’s suddenly very hard to breathe. Because Laura knows that voice, knows it like she knows her own face in the mirror and the reach of her limbs, and Carmilla Karnstein is alive.

She steps forward, reaching out, her palm extended—something whips by her head and lands at Carmilla’s feet. It bounces a few times, but Laura can clearly make out the pulled pin on the grenade spinning lazily on the pavement.

When Laura could open her eyes again, the Winter Soldier was gone.

0o0o0o0

“How do you know her?” Laura asks. The SHIELD safe house is deathly silent, and her voice sounds like breaking glass.

“The Winter Soldier?” Betty says, redundantly. She didn’t need the clarification; the look of heartbreak on Laura’s face was keen enough to connect the dots.

Laura just nods, her eyes a little less bright, her mouth a little more pinched.

“Everyone knew about her.” Betty continued. “In whispers. You know how it is in training. And she was the best of us.”

“But you actually met her.”

“You could call it that.” Betty said, her laugh dry and brittle in her throat. “I was collateral. I didn’t meet her in the traditional way that assassins meet, or I’d be dead.”

Dead. It seemed like Laura kept company with the almost-dead, the just-barely alive, collecting her friends from the select group of people who’d cheated death. Like La Fontaine, who’d scraped their life from the sand in Iraq, like Doctor Lawrence who admitted to swallowing bullets and spitting them back out again, to Carmilla— _Carmilla_ —

“How did you know her?” Betty asked, in that inflectionless way of hers.

“Her name was— _is_ —Carmilla Karnstein.”

“From your Howling Commandos?”

Laura could hear all the questions that Betty respected her too much to ask. _The German sleeper agent? The soldier who gave you up to HYDRA?_

_The one that died for you?_

“Yeah.” Laura said roughly, and her tone didn’t invite Betty to continue their conversation.

But it’s too late for Laura not to think about the last time she saw Carmilla, and Laura remembers, remembers, remembers. She remembers Carmilla dragged, kicking and screaming in front of the line of kneeling Commandos—she’d tried to free them in the night, not knowing that her mother (her mother, the director of HYDRA) had already moved them.

Laura remembered the way they’d jammed her into an empty bomb casing, laughing when her jaw hit the rim hard enough that Carmilla had nearly bit clean through her tongue, blood running down her chin, and staining her teeth. And she’d watched— _oh god she could only watch_ —the slow and steady pour of gallon after gallon of motor oil into the open top of the casing, the way they’d filled it to the very brim and then shoved Carmilla’s head deeper and deeper time and time again until the bang of her boots against the sides of got weaker and weaker until there was nothing at all.

The slow, steady tip of Carmilla’s metal coffin out of the aerial loading bay and onto the rocks hundreds of feet below.

Carmilla was dead. She was dead. Laura had watched it happen, had screamed and begged, and pleaded, and made promises that she was unable to keep—and Carmilla Karnstein was dead.

Except, she wasn’t. She was alive. Right now, somewhere, Carmilla Karnstein was breathing, her heart was beating—

_“No matter what, I’m always with you to the end of the line.” A smirk, her head ducked a little too close to Laura’s. “Cupcake.”_

“She’s an assassin.” Betty said, her voice low and soft, bringing Laura back to the present. “She’s not… she not who you think she is, anymore. If you face her with any reservations, she’ll take you apart.”

Laura smiled, sadly. _Too late._


	2. Chapter 2

She could feel it, whenever the men in charge of her prostheses had to fix something. A broken shock absorber in her left thigh that ached when she stepped, a cracked casing on her forearm sending sharp stabbing pains up her wrist. The fixing hurt almost as much as the damage itself.Soldering irons sent a hot wire of pain lancing up her shoulder to pulse behind her ear, and joint reinforcements made her teeth ache.

She vaguely knew of the concept of phantom limbs, and sometimes when her mind managed to piece itself together enough for her to wonder at such things, she thought of herself as a phantom limb. A painful reminder of something long gone, a hurt without a wound.

Her thoughts never leave her head, and the pain never manifests beyond the tightening of her muscles and the stiffening of her spine. Any break in the façade would have her strapped back down, mind obliterated, the searing cold of cryo eating at the skin where her arm met her shoulder and her leg met her thigh—

An errant spark from a careless welder made her hiss in pain, and she lashed out without even thinking. Bones crunched under her metal hand when she made contact with his ribs and she _grinned—_

“What’s the hold up?” a voice snapped from the hallway, heeling clicking on the stone floor. It was a strange change from the usual stomp of combat boots.

“Something happened on the last mission. She’s been uncooperative and- and _sullen_ for lack of a better word.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The woman’s voice was closer now. “That sounds like Carmilla to me.”

Carmilla. That name again.

She looked down, ignoring the men still pointing guns at her. Her hands curled into fists on her lap. She knew that name. She knew it, but she didn’t. It was as foreign her arm and leg—a shadow of something true and real, _taken_ from her in a way that she couldn’t remember and couldn’t articulate. Her mind was sluggish, like the soldiers that sometimes showed up for duty drunk and stupid.

“Report.”

She blinked, slowly. Were they talking to… were they talking to _her_ …? She saw the slap coming a mile away, but didn’t bother to avoid it.

“Asset.” It was the woman with the heels. “Mission report.”

“What is… what is my name?” And the bustle around her body stopped

“Clarify.” One of them barked. She no longer cared to try and keep track of the voices.

“One of the targets called me something on the bridge. A name.” She looked up, squinting. Everything was hazy and bright, overexposed and out of focus. “I knew her. From before…” A headache started to pound at her temples, spreading behind her eyes and pulsing behind her cheekbones. Images, shattered and broken, slipped across her sight, superimposed across reality.

The woman in front of her… memories formed like frost on the contours of her face, crystalizing into something familiar.

_”…Maman?”_

The woman reared back as if she had stood from her seat and slapped her.

“What is the meaning of this?” The woman—no, _Maman_ —said, her voice icy fury.

“She’s been out of cryo for too long.” One of the men at her shoulder stuttered. “She’s usually never out for more than 24-hours—!”

“What is my name?” She asked, more urgently. She jerked unsteadily to her feet, lunging for _Maman’s_ throat. “Tell me. TELL ME!”

“Carmilla, manners.” _Maman_ tsked, before pressing something concealed in her hand.

The circuitry in her leg and arm went dead, and the dead weight of the metal sent her straight to the floor.

“Yes, your name is Carmilla.” _Maman_ said. “Though I don’t know why it matters, seeing as your brain will be jelly in a few minutes.” She turned to the nervous looking man she’d walked in with. “I want her wiped and prepped to go in twelve hours. Nothing can go wrong.” 

Two soldiers levered Carmilla off the floor, pressing her into the chair, and strapping her arms down with thick belts. A mouth guard was shoved roughly between her teeth.

_My name is Carmilla. My name is Carmilla. My name is Carmilla. My name is Carmilla. My name is—_

Carmilla couldn’t repress a whimper when the headpieces locked into place, the shock points pressing uncomfortably against her skin. She was sweating, there’d be burn marks this time—

_My name is Carmilla. My name is Carmilla. My name is Carm—_

The machine whined, the electrodes heating against her skin.

_MY NAME IS CARMILLA MY NAMES IS CARMILLA MY NAME IS CARMILLA—_

And then the machine turned on. Even if she couldn’t remember anything else, the deafening sound of the machine inside her skull was something beyond memories. And how sad was it, that she knew this pain better than herself-

_my nameiscarm my name is name is carmilla carmilla carimilla_

_my name is…_

_my name…_

_…is—_

_…_

_Laura…?_


End file.
